> You have to consider, they'd have to develop their own desktop environment for it

No, nobody says to go clean-slate and redo everything. That would be madness. What I am saying, is to modify the looks, gnome-panel, nautilus and context menus etc. of Gnome (or the equivelants of KDE) and then create a product that is *different enough*, and yet based and *still compatible* with Gnome/KDE. Think more of what Ximian does for Gnome, but just one step further. API compatibility should be retained, otherwise you lose easy porting of apps.

> and then provide developers with some incentive to port to it.

API and source compatibility should be retained no matter what. It is important to get apps easily.